On Wed, Nov 12, 2025 at 9:02 PM Carl George <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> On Wed, Nov 12, 2025 at 7:21 PM Gordon Messmer <[email protected]> 
> wrote:
> >
> > On 2025-11-12 4:28 PM, Neal Gompa wrote:
> > > No, we can't, because the default for RHEL-ish platforms is a rolling
> > > major content stream. That means that the upgrade path is broken
> > > without the releasever thing. Without some way to update the value of
> > > $releasever as*part* of the upgrade transaction, it would be broken.
> > > We didn't have time to implement a mechanism for RHEL 10, but it might
> > > be solvable for RHEL 11.
> >
> >
> > I don't have any EUS licenses to test, but doesn't this mean that EPEL
> > isn't configured to support EUS systems, by default? It looks like
> > they'd get EPEL content for the wrong minor release.
>
> RHEL EUS should work out of the box.  Enabling EUS involves switching
> to the EUS repos and running a command like `subscription-manager
> release --set 10.0`, after which point releasever will be set to 10.0
> and the default epel-release metalink will direct that system to the
> matching EPEL minor version, e.g. `epel-z-10.0`.

I need to correct myself here.  It occurred to me that RHEL 10 EUS
actually exists now, so I went to verify.  `subscription-manager
release --set` doesn't actually change releasever, it just replaces
instances of `$releasever` in redhat.repo with the string you give it,
e.g. 10.0.  So if you want to use EPEL 10.0 on RHEL 10.0 EUS, you'll
need to write 10.0 to `/etc/dnf/vars/releasever` in addition to the
normal steps to enable EUS.

>
> https://access.redhat.com/articles/rhel-eus
>
> That said, the EPEL Steering Committee has explicitly declined to keep
> EPEL minor branches open to correspond with EUS, so EUS users won't be
> getting updates for their EPEL content.  But they should continue to
> have an EPEL 10.0 repo served from the archive that works as well as
> it does on the day it's retired, which is a massive improvement over
> how things worked in earlier EPEL major versions.
>
> >
> > I don't know if supporting "RHEL-ish" non-RHEL platforms is a priority,
> > but during the gap between the release of a new RHEL minor and a
> > RHEL-ish minor, those systems will be offered content for the wrong
> > minor release, which may fail (e.g.:
> > https://www.reddit.com/r/AlmaLinux/comments/1ouygdn/issue_related_to_openssl_library_when_updating/)
>
> The delay between RHEL and RHEL rebuilds has always been a headache.
> Early on in the planning for EPEL 10 we thought we could solve this by
> having systems always ask for an EPEL minor version matching their OS
> minor version, but we discovered handling it this way would cause
> upgrade path issues.
>
> https://pagure.io/epel/issue/324
>
> Jonathan Wright from Alma in on the EPEL Steering Committee and
> participated in the related discussion during meetings.  His input was
> he would rather Alma systems be temporarily broken during the rebuild
> gap instead of being broken until manual intervention took place,
> something that would be especially problematic for systems using
> dnf-automatic.
>
> >
> > It's possible that this could cause serious problems on RHEL systems,
> > though... If I have a RHEL 10.0 system with EPEL, and I run "dnf install
> > python3.13", it will pull an openssl-libs update along with it, because
> > openssl uses versioned symbols. But openssl requires libz, and libz does
> > *not* provide versioned symbols.
> >
> > Hypothetically, if RHEL 10.1 had rebased both openssl and libz, that
> > process might result in updating openssl to support python3.13, but not
> > updating libz, which could cause runtime linking failures with
> > everything linked to openssl.
> >
> > ( I hope we fix that someday:
> > https://github.com/rpm-software-management/rpm/pull/2372 )
> >
> > If the epel repo definition included the current minor, it's true that
> > users would need to do two updates to fully update a system to a new
> > minor. They'd get new platform packages with "dnf update" and then get
> > new EPEL packages with a second "dnf update". That's not great.
>
> Indeed, that is the scenario we identified in the issue I linked
> above, which we decided against due to the dnf-automatic scenario.
>
> > But I
> > think it would fix problems with RHEL-ish systems during their update
> > delay, fix problems with EUS systems (that I think exist, but haven't
> > verified), and avoid potential problems with "dnf install xxx" on a RHEL
> > system that hasn't updated to the newest minor release yet.
> >
> > --
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>
>
> --
> Carl George



-- 
Carl George

-- 
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